February Snow Flurries

As we get into the thick of the semester, the snowflakes have already begun to fall:

Capital-Phobic Cathy: You emailed me saying, "this is cathy from your hamster business communication class. im not doing too good and wonder what im doing wrong."

Look to the left side of of your keyboard. No, your other left. There is a key labeled SHIFT. You should try pressing it when beginning a sentence or using a proper noun, for starters.

We covered this in class. I gave a handout the first week which told you how to answer study questions. There's a whole section on the importance of using Standard English. It contains the sentence, "The shift key is your friend when a word needs to be capitalized." We even discussed it. I followed up on this with a detailed email giving extra tips for doing well on study questions. I reminded you in class to check your email. You would do well to take this advice as it also covers the other reasons you are failing, such as not using paragraphs, not giving examples, parroting other students' responses, and not meeting the minimum word count. I've asked you to make an appointment with me so we can discuss your progress. I'm still waiting for that call or email.

"I Have a Life Outside Your Class" Ivan: Part of being an adult is knowing how to prioritize your time so that you can give each aspect the attention it needs. Your work demonstrates to me that you have done little or no reading so far. When I asked for discussion about how three ancient hamster epics are alike and how they differ culturally, your response consisted of "They are all poems, they all have hamster heroes, and all the heroes go on journeys," thus providing me with a visit from the Clue Fairy. You asked for an extension on the first draft of the research assignment because you had an emergency. I gave you 48 hours, and you turned in a bunch of crappy links (Wikipedia? Encyclopedia.com? Really?) you'd Googled after I told you not to Google, to use the library, and to cite using MLA. I even provided you with resources to be able to do all these things with the click of a mouse and some basic reading skills. Getting huffy and telling me about your life outside class being more important than my "stupid assignment" is not going to change the requirements. If your life is so dramatic that you have no time to read, then perhaps Ancient Hamster Literary Classics is not the course for you this term.

Goodreads.com Gertrude: You're busted. The assignment called for annotations of three potential research sources. I gave it to you last week. You just submitted your research topic a week and a half ago. You turned in all fifteen sources required by the end of the term, and they were all books even though the assignment requires at least five articles. It's amazing that you found the time to read fifteen books in one week, but I guess Goodreads.com made that easy for you. Copying and pasting reviews word for word is plagiarism. We covered this in the syllabus and in class discussion the first week. You've taken Hamster Writing Fundamentals 101 and 102, which also explain this in great detail. You have no excuse. I'll see you in my chair's office next week.

At this rate, I will need a shovel to make it out of the blizzard before March!